Scarcity Worksheet

Scarcity gets taught as a vocabulary word before students ever feel it. This worksheet fixes that by dropping them into a decision real hospitals face: there are more people who need a kidney than there are kidneys available, and someone has to decide who gets one. Students spend the activity testing different rules for making that call, first-come-first-served, a lottery, price, and need-based medical matching, before defending the version they'd actually choose to have in place.

Plan for a full class period, 40 to 50 minutes. The activity runs as a structured jigsaw: students start in expert groups where each group masters one allocation method, listing its benefits and its costs before moving to a home group where they teach that method to classmates working on the other three. Only after hearing all four methods explained does each home group rank them and settle on a joint recommendation, which sets up the sharpest disagreements in the room.

The individual recommendation in Part 3 is where the thinking gets tested. Students have to name the social goal their choice prioritizes, equity or efficiency being the two most common answers, and admit what they're giving up to get it. Watch for students who pick a method in Part 3 that contradicts what their home group agreed to in Part 2. That gap is often a sign they've actually thought it through rather than just followed the group.

This works well anytime after you've introduced the basic definition of scarcity, since students need the vocabulary before they can apply it to a decision this weighty. It also pairs naturally with a broader unit on how societies decide who gets what when there isn't enough to go around, whether that's kidneys, vaccines during a shortage, or seats in a popular class.

If you're short on time, the jigsaw structure compresses cleanly. Assign each expert group just two methods instead of four, and move straight from Part 1 to Part 3, having students argue their individual recommendation without the full home-group debate in between. That still delivers the core skill of weighing trade-offs under a real constraint, just with less classroom choreography. If you have a full block period instead, extend Part 2 by having each home group present its ranking to the rest of the class and defend it against questions from other groups. That step surfaces disagreements that a single small-group conversation tends to bury, and it gives quieter students a second, lower-stakes chance to test their reasoning out loud before writing their individual recommendation in Part 3.

This activity is from Module 31 of the Rapunzl curriculum, The Economic Way of Thinking.

Who Gets the Kidney

You'll grapple with one of the toughest questions in economics: how do you fairly allocate a resource when there isn't enough to go around and the stakes are life and death? You'll weigh the benefits and drawbacks of different allocation methods — first-come-first-served, lottery, price, need-based criteria, and others — and ultimately defend a clear rule for how that resource should be distributed, backing your position with sound reasoning.

Part 1 — Expert group

Master your assigned method (price, lottery, first-come, need + medical match). List three benefits and two costs of using it to allocate donor kidneys.

Part 2 — Home group debate

Teach your method to your home group. As a group, rank the methods best→worst for allocating kidneys and agree on a recommendation.

Part 3 — Your recommendation (individual)

Which rule SHOULD govern kidney allocation, and why? Name the social goal your choice prioritizes (e.g., equity, efficiency) and what you're trading off.

Teacher Notes

The expert-group stage is where uneven participation shows up first. Some students will default to whichever method sounds fairest without doing the work of listing a real cost, so circulate during Part 1 and push for something specific, not just "it's unfair." A student assigned to defend price-based allocation, for instance, should be able to name efficiency as a benefit and name exactly who gets shut out as the cost, not just say the method "favors the rich."

Part 2 tends to produce more agreement than Part 3, since group dynamics can flatten disagreement during the ranking discussion. Part 3 is designed to break that flattening by asking for an individual position, so don't be surprised if students who nodded along with their home group's ranking write something different once they're on their own. That gap is useful, not a problem, and it's worth naming out loud to the class.

If time allows, ask students to connect this activity to another scarce resource they've encountered outside class, whether it's a class everyone wants to get into, a limited number of internship spots, or concert tickets. The mechanism is the same: more demand than supply, and a rule someone has to choose.

When you grade or score Part 3, weight the reasoning over the conclusion. There isn't a single correct rule for allocating kidneys, and two students can land on opposite recommendations while both demonstrating a solid grasp of the trade-offs involved. What separates a strong response from a weak one is whether the student names the social goal they're prioritizing and honestly states what they're sacrificing to get it, not which method they ultimately pick.

The answer key for this activity, along with the other activities in this module, is in the Rapunzl teacher portal.

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